Say Goodbye to Ownership

For whatever kinds of quasi-Marxism I tend to spiral into when nursing a drink into the thoughtful hours of the night, I have always believed in the power of competition. I mean, it’s a good formula: the kind of intuitive, commonsense idea that you can retreat to in comfort when the rest of the world stops making sense. Hence, the idea of a free market in a capitalist world was never something I disagreed with, contrary to the little group of people who have no doubt quietly labeled me a “commie.” Further, many people (I imagine, most people) have come to accept capitalism as the means to increase efficiency to maximum, like some sort of beatific reversal of Murphy’s Law. And with that, I cannot help but agree.

To a point, that is.

Increasing profit to maximum turns out to be a double-edged sword: pursuit of profit more often than not generates the useful byproduct of increased efficiency, but the problem is that this is only a byproduct. With the pursuit of profit as the primary focus, a company is not required to think of the good of the consumer or, far less, the good of society. The tobacco industry is the usual example for this sort of thing.

But as society moves unblinkingly into the new century, a disturbing trend begins to form in producer/consumer relationship, namely, a trend away from ownership.

In days of yore, when you bought a product, it was yours. You did whatever you wanted with it because you owned it. Now, however, it becomes increasingly more common to merely lease a product’s services for a monthly fee.

I first noticed this with games like World of Warcraft, with their monthly subscriber’s fee, something I ignored when I was mired in the game. But now, with almost six months between me and my last login, I look back with a disquieting feeling in my stomach, and think of how quickly $14.99 a month added up, and further, that I never really owned the game. When I stopped paying my virtual parking meter, the flowing realms of Azeroth sealed their doors to me. Of course it is easy to argue that this is common practice for the whole genre of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, it becomes disconcerting to look around at the rest of the world and see it invading the rest of the industry. Xbox LIVE, somewhere around the same time, tried to add this element to many games which, arguably, did not need them, and all to tempt players into signing up for a monthly fee.

But it’s not just video games, either. Cell phones have always required monthly fees, not much different than landlines, but this became more noticeable as the evolution of the phone resulted in the bizarre species of all-in-one digital Swiss Armies Knives with greater and greater monthly fees. The result is the same as with World of Warcraft: when I stop paying the subscription fee, my phone no longer serves its primary function.

Netflix is another company that only gives the consumers a product as long as the subscription is being paid; cancel it, and you are left with no tangible product whatsoever. Gamefly, being the video game equivalent, operates in like fashion.

Zune recently put out a new deal that offers unlimited downloads per month, so long as the subscription is met. While it is true that you are allowed to “keep” 10 of those songs per month, the haunting power of Digital Rights Management reduces such claims to mere rhetoric, reminding us yet again that though you purchase something, it is not really yours.

Last and most insidious is Amazon’s Kindle, whose diabolical agenda I detailed thoroughly in my article for Viewpoints a while back (an article which, by the by, is going to be re-written and posted here without the restrictions that were placed on me by the newspaper). In sum, while the Kindle has no monthly subscription rate, anything you buy is merely leased; you don’t own the books on your Kindle, Amazon does.

The point of all this is centered around the value of ownership. People who own things have power: they can re-sell, modify, or lend their possessions, given them total control over the thing they paid for. Whoever owns something has control over it, plain and simple. If the populace dishes out money but ultimately has no control, then we have a problem. One almost cannot help but be reminded of serfdom, in which peasants toiled on lands they did not own.

Make no mistake about it, paying a monthly subscription rate for a product that you never give the consumer is brilliant business; in the same way that renting a house indefinitely is better in the long-term than selling it for one-time gain. In the latter instance, you have to keep selling houses to continue making money; in the former instance, your product is essentially used over and over, with no expenditure on the company’s part. If this is an apt metaphor, then it seems we are rapidly approaching a world in which all the houses are for rent and none of them can be bought. The power goes out of the hands of the consumers and into the hands of the companies.